FIGHTING TALK

YOU don’t look to Idles for harmony and calmness. Even the members of Idles admit that. Sitting outside his favourite cafe in the Stokes Croft area of Bristol on a hot August day, the band’s frontman, Joe Talbot, acknowledges his own significant part in their combustibility.

“The universe isn’t doing bad things to you,” he says. “You can only choose how to react to your anger and change that. I was the band’s biggest problem, even though I was the main pusher of everything. Now, the band has now come past those problems, but you wouldn’t know it when you see us. We’re cunts to each other, but that is our love.”

As emotionally honest in life as in song, for Talbot the Idles story is one of hard work and intense, often combative experience. What the band have achieved through cathartic volume has given musical articulacy to emotional incoherence. During the past 11 years, they have sought to express themselves as vividly as possible – raging against the world around them as much as against themselves and their own inner frustrations. Listening to their albums – in particular, their latest, Ultra Mono – it is possible to hear a band putting everything on public display, addressing our terrible times directly, without obfuscation or metaphor. There are songs about immigration, toxic masculinity, the demonisation of the working class and the decline of city centres, each one bolting out of the gate in a blaze of sparks.

Talbot, guitarist Mark Bowen, guitarist Lee Kiernan, bassist Adam Devonshire and drummer Jon Beavis have created with Idles something powerful that clearly resonates across many levels. Astonishingly, their ferocious, enraged brand of post-hardcore has brought them into the Top 10; next year they are due to play four nights at Brixton Academy. Their success has been hard-won, certainly, but they have made their journey from Bristol pubs and clubs to arena stages in the company of a growing community of fans, the AF Gang, who have responded to the rage and joy that spills out from Idles on stage.

“There’s an energy on the recordings, but live. “And they seem to have a universal appeal – they’re not just a guy band. They have an energy people want to tap into in the present climate.”